It's rare a piece had resonated with me quite as much as this. It took nearly 11 years of scraping by paycheck to paycheck, flat broke in NYC, and getting fired from the YouTube content farm of a major legacy publisher most people only dream of working for before I could finally admit majoring in English lit was a mistake. Fuck them and fuck the whole system. You can just walk away and do something else with your life. The workplace will be less toxic and you'll get paid better too.
I really only regret not pulling the plug sooner. It's hard to admit you royally fucked up and threw a decade of your short life in the trash with absolutely nothing to show for it, but ignoring it won't make it go away.
Just had a flashback to Stuff White People Like. Back when the humor in white people criticizing other white people could come in a form like that... just deadpan and detailed descriptions of unusual behaviors that educated whites take for granted as "normal" in their friends, or in themselves.
How far white people criticizing other white people has declined by now... you had to sit down and actually intend to read a SWPL post, you couldn't just glance at it and see a trigger word and get the entire content of the post in 5 seconds. And SWPL posts actually used writing, as in, you know, descriptions of thoughts and actions in a sequence. It didn't just wink and nod at the audience and encourage us to go "Ah, you said a word that is clearly designed to be relatable to someone like me."
Anyway, even the weird internet niche of white people criticizing white people for being white people used to be so much better.
I tend to agree with the take that neither culture nor politics have meaningfully advanced after about 2009, only technology. So rather than “creating content,” we’re simply repackaging and cannibalizing the same material over and over, in ever more bite-sized and efficiently targeted chunks, with dramatically diminishing returns. The internet’s tendency to flatten everything towards a vast equilibrium seems to have largely overwhelmed its ability to inspire, at least in my particular milieu.
As someone who was a part of what was both affectionately and pejoratively called "indie lit" for almost a decade, it's been both interesting and a massive bummer to see the same thing happen in small independent publishers of fiction. If anyone wants to know more about this, I have a lot to say about it!
But I do remember distinctly how small presses that felt essential began to collapse inward because the single person who was doing everything by themselves (editing, layout, publishing, logistics, royalties, etc) folded because after 6 years of making less than 20k per year publishing novels (and, honestly, most of these people really did this as a labor of love, making less than probably a thousand dollars per year doing it), they just gave up on this second job that never paid them in anything but facebook likes and twitter follows.
The ones that remained either got enormously lucky or had a lot of independent money (Maybe no one remembers Scott McClanahan anymore, but he was a rockstar in the small press world, and he may not have even been known at all had eccentric millionaire Giancarlo DiTrapano not enjoyed being publishing books most people wouldn't). But part of the collapse was that most of the darlings of the small press world who talked endlessly about the online writing community jumped ship to traditional publishing the moment they had a chance (which was definitely the right career decision for people like Roxane Gay, who would maybe still be writing traumatic short stories about rape and awkward romance had her nonfiction not hit so well with readers).
But, for me, the moment it began to die was when I noticed how most of the writers I knew didn't really write or read anymore. They mostly became aspiring political pundits.
Whenever I see these soulless content farms, nü-Gawker and the like, pumping out standardized, assembly-line takes, my mind wanders to what those nerds over at OpenAI are working on. I see no reason even a modern AI, with a properly trained model, managed by someone who understands how to feed an AI contextual metadata, could not do most of the work of writing a Gawker essay on a topic.
You couldn't pull the human out of the loop quite yet. They'd still have to manage and prod the easily-distracted beast. Cut tangents short. Fill in prompts to poke and prod it in the desired direction. Sometimes take the reins, give it a sentence or two, then have it riff. Make sure it does not hew so closely to chunks of training data that it crosses into plagiarism. Right now, it's still a better business decision to make underpaid lit majors do the work. An AI-written nü-Gawker piece would be a gimmick, not a business plan. But there are no technical obstacles between us and prolefeed, only the fact that AI is still young and meat brains remain a cheap and plentiful resource.
"..Ask Jesse Singal the writer how much more Jesse Singal the podcaster makes." But Jesse Singal the podcaster wouldn't have an audience for the podcast if he hadn't been a good writer first and I think part of why the podcast is successful because it's a way to merge the voices of two good writers, plus their funny schtick about Katie being the boss.
The issue with media jobs is simple, but no one wants to absorb it. Paglia nailed it long ago with Vamps and Tramps.
There is no heat. Bc the truth is being denied.
You can't be edgy anymore with Yay trans! The heat is now sadly: Men aren't women.
You can't be edgy anymore with Trump Bad! The heat is now sadly: Trump was fine.
Rage Against the unVaxxed is freezing fucking cold.
And there will be no civil war, bc the red states and rural areas will shut down food and trucking for blue areas and the will be starved out in days. THIS IS REALITY. Media has to ACCEPT REALITY. Underlying all this is force. Is brawn. is property rights. Is talent. Is biology. In the mind / body duality, the body wins.
We have to get back to feeble wonkie beta cucks feeling bad about themselves, while men kick sand in their faces for media to really work. Bc REALITY cannot be denied.
Media cannot alter reality, It can only hold a mirror up to it. Media right now continues to be a marxist distorted mirror, so like ALL MARXISM is fails to feed as many as it could.
Sci-fi has been shit for years, bc the hero's libertarian man against society frame isn't there to woo the boys who need to read it.
Look folks, men aren't women and Trump was fine SHOULD NOT BE HEAT, it's obvious and common. It is the REALITY we are all born into like chains. The academic effort to invert reality is a failure. Hunter Thompson worked bc even while he raged at Nixon, he did so surrounded by guns, drugs, roaring engines, and explosions.
USA#1!!! is REQUIRED as a baseline to invite Department Store sized audiences.
Heat is masculine. There is nothing toxic in it. Fat women aren't healthy and beautiful. Its hard to work out every day and not stuff your head with twinkies.
And Paglia was right, Apollonian art signifies an ascending culture and Dionysian art is proof you are dying.
Freddie - I'd like to see a piece on Don't Look Up winning, bc it failed to actually be about Climate Change. It's a hilarious dark comedy and the formula is simple. Trump voters all love it.
I went to a small liberal arts college in 2002, majoring in English lit. I wanted to be a journalist, but we didn't have a journalism major. And I didn't just want to be any journalist - I wanted to be an editorial writer for the New York Times.
But after one journalism class, and seeing how many accident stories and crime stories I would have to slog through in an attempt to "make it," I decided that wasn't for me. I had about the same chances of playing pro football as I did at being a nationally-known journalist.
I started a blog in 2003 because I loved to write. I still do. But I never expected my blogging to turn into a paid career.
I think most people on Substack, if they make anything at all, make money like the average person on Etsy: just a little bit extra to have fun with.
The lie behind the "long tail" was that things on the long tail actually make enough money to be financially successful. Most do not.
But there will always be people writing for the love of it, like the passionate editors of Wikipedia to whom Google, Apple, etc have outsourced the work of defining what is true and what is false.
Now I work for an online college. The closest I get to writing professionally is revising grants or editing courses. And I'm fine with that.
I think articles like this one serve as a good reality check for people who still think journalism is a smart career choice. But are there really many people like that left? The writing was already on the wall back in the early 2000s.
All true, but don't forget to also point the finger at where it belongs: us, the idiotic American population, who gravitate away from reading into watching more and more every year, in a million different ways.
Good writing is a superpower, even now, so I hope your piece inspires a few job changes. I’m now on my 4th career (as I approach my 63rd birthday)—none in a “communications”-type role—and one constant in all of them has been the opportunity to write, as an essential part of my job, pretty much every day. There’s more than one way to make a living with your pen!
It's rare a piece had resonated with me quite as much as this. It took nearly 11 years of scraping by paycheck to paycheck, flat broke in NYC, and getting fired from the YouTube content farm of a major legacy publisher most people only dream of working for before I could finally admit majoring in English lit was a mistake. Fuck them and fuck the whole system. You can just walk away and do something else with your life. The workplace will be less toxic and you'll get paid better too.
I really only regret not pulling the plug sooner. It's hard to admit you royally fucked up and threw a decade of your short life in the trash with absolutely nothing to show for it, but ignoring it won't make it go away.
Just had a flashback to Stuff White People Like. Back when the humor in white people criticizing other white people could come in a form like that... just deadpan and detailed descriptions of unusual behaviors that educated whites take for granted as "normal" in their friends, or in themselves.
How far white people criticizing other white people has declined by now... you had to sit down and actually intend to read a SWPL post, you couldn't just glance at it and see a trigger word and get the entire content of the post in 5 seconds. And SWPL posts actually used writing, as in, you know, descriptions of thoughts and actions in a sequence. It didn't just wink and nod at the audience and encourage us to go "Ah, you said a word that is clearly designed to be relatable to someone like me."
Anyway, even the weird internet niche of white people criticizing white people for being white people used to be so much better.
What does an editor at NYT earn per year, what did Bari Weiss give up: $400,000?
What does Brooks earn: $500,000NYT and an extra $500,000 for tv?
I tend to agree with the take that neither culture nor politics have meaningfully advanced after about 2009, only technology. So rather than “creating content,” we’re simply repackaging and cannibalizing the same material over and over, in ever more bite-sized and efficiently targeted chunks, with dramatically diminishing returns. The internet’s tendency to flatten everything towards a vast equilibrium seems to have largely overwhelmed its ability to inspire, at least in my particular milieu.
That random Sopranos quote at the end! Nice
jfc that takedown of nuGawker. Freddie, remind me never to get on your bad side.
As someone who was a part of what was both affectionately and pejoratively called "indie lit" for almost a decade, it's been both interesting and a massive bummer to see the same thing happen in small independent publishers of fiction. If anyone wants to know more about this, I have a lot to say about it!
But I do remember distinctly how small presses that felt essential began to collapse inward because the single person who was doing everything by themselves (editing, layout, publishing, logistics, royalties, etc) folded because after 6 years of making less than 20k per year publishing novels (and, honestly, most of these people really did this as a labor of love, making less than probably a thousand dollars per year doing it), they just gave up on this second job that never paid them in anything but facebook likes and twitter follows.
The ones that remained either got enormously lucky or had a lot of independent money (Maybe no one remembers Scott McClanahan anymore, but he was a rockstar in the small press world, and he may not have even been known at all had eccentric millionaire Giancarlo DiTrapano not enjoyed being publishing books most people wouldn't). But part of the collapse was that most of the darlings of the small press world who talked endlessly about the online writing community jumped ship to traditional publishing the moment they had a chance (which was definitely the right career decision for people like Roxane Gay, who would maybe still be writing traumatic short stories about rape and awkward romance had her nonfiction not hit so well with readers).
But, for me, the moment it began to die was when I noticed how most of the writers I knew didn't really write or read anymore. They mostly became aspiring political pundits.
If you want data on public library fiction circulation which is one measure of reading let me know.
Whenever I see these soulless content farms, nü-Gawker and the like, pumping out standardized, assembly-line takes, my mind wanders to what those nerds over at OpenAI are working on. I see no reason even a modern AI, with a properly trained model, managed by someone who understands how to feed an AI contextual metadata, could not do most of the work of writing a Gawker essay on a topic.
You couldn't pull the human out of the loop quite yet. They'd still have to manage and prod the easily-distracted beast. Cut tangents short. Fill in prompts to poke and prod it in the desired direction. Sometimes take the reins, give it a sentence or two, then have it riff. Make sure it does not hew so closely to chunks of training data that it crosses into plagiarism. Right now, it's still a better business decision to make underpaid lit majors do the work. An AI-written nü-Gawker piece would be a gimmick, not a business plan. But there are no technical obstacles between us and prolefeed, only the fact that AI is still young and meat brains remain a cheap and plentiful resource.
"..Ask Jesse Singal the writer how much more Jesse Singal the podcaster makes." But Jesse Singal the podcaster wouldn't have an audience for the podcast if he hadn't been a good writer first and I think part of why the podcast is successful because it's a way to merge the voices of two good writers, plus their funny schtick about Katie being the boss.
The issue with media jobs is simple, but no one wants to absorb it. Paglia nailed it long ago with Vamps and Tramps.
There is no heat. Bc the truth is being denied.
You can't be edgy anymore with Yay trans! The heat is now sadly: Men aren't women.
You can't be edgy anymore with Trump Bad! The heat is now sadly: Trump was fine.
Rage Against the unVaxxed is freezing fucking cold.
And there will be no civil war, bc the red states and rural areas will shut down food and trucking for blue areas and the will be starved out in days. THIS IS REALITY. Media has to ACCEPT REALITY. Underlying all this is force. Is brawn. is property rights. Is talent. Is biology. In the mind / body duality, the body wins.
We have to get back to feeble wonkie beta cucks feeling bad about themselves, while men kick sand in their faces for media to really work. Bc REALITY cannot be denied.
Media cannot alter reality, It can only hold a mirror up to it. Media right now continues to be a marxist distorted mirror, so like ALL MARXISM is fails to feed as many as it could.
Sci-fi has been shit for years, bc the hero's libertarian man against society frame isn't there to woo the boys who need to read it.
Look folks, men aren't women and Trump was fine SHOULD NOT BE HEAT, it's obvious and common. It is the REALITY we are all born into like chains. The academic effort to invert reality is a failure. Hunter Thompson worked bc even while he raged at Nixon, he did so surrounded by guns, drugs, roaring engines, and explosions.
USA#1!!! is REQUIRED as a baseline to invite Department Store sized audiences.
Heat is masculine. There is nothing toxic in it. Fat women aren't healthy and beautiful. Its hard to work out every day and not stuff your head with twinkies.
And Paglia was right, Apollonian art signifies an ascending culture and Dionysian art is proof you are dying.
Freddie - I'd like to see a piece on Don't Look Up winning, bc it failed to actually be about Climate Change. It's a hilarious dark comedy and the formula is simple. Trump voters all love it.
I went to a small liberal arts college in 2002, majoring in English lit. I wanted to be a journalist, but we didn't have a journalism major. And I didn't just want to be any journalist - I wanted to be an editorial writer for the New York Times.
But after one journalism class, and seeing how many accident stories and crime stories I would have to slog through in an attempt to "make it," I decided that wasn't for me. I had about the same chances of playing pro football as I did at being a nationally-known journalist.
I started a blog in 2003 because I loved to write. I still do. But I never expected my blogging to turn into a paid career.
I think most people on Substack, if they make anything at all, make money like the average person on Etsy: just a little bit extra to have fun with.
The lie behind the "long tail" was that things on the long tail actually make enough money to be financially successful. Most do not.
But there will always be people writing for the love of it, like the passionate editors of Wikipedia to whom Google, Apple, etc have outsourced the work of defining what is true and what is false.
Now I work for an online college. The closest I get to writing professionally is revising grants or editing courses. And I'm fine with that.
I think articles like this one serve as a good reality check for people who still think journalism is a smart career choice. But are there really many people like that left? The writing was already on the wall back in the early 2000s.
All true, but don't forget to also point the finger at where it belongs: us, the idiotic American population, who gravitate away from reading into watching more and more every year, in a million different ways.
Good writing is a superpower, even now, so I hope your piece inspires a few job changes. I’m now on my 4th career (as I approach my 63rd birthday)—none in a “communications”-type role—and one constant in all of them has been the opportunity to write, as an essential part of my job, pretty much every day. There’s more than one way to make a living with your pen!